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The article is a description of the real-life experience based on the implementation of a financial forecasting model to inform budgeting and strategic planning. The organization is a charity-based health system that has hospitals and medical centers that provide care to the community. The health system performs a central budgeting process which is typically based on aggregation of individual budgets from the various hospitals and medical centers within the system. All financial data are reported to a central financial information system. Traditionally budgeting was done based on prior year's financial performance with a slight adjustment based on the hospital or medical center finance department's educated guess. This article describes the new forecasting method instituted to predict revenue and expenses, and to improve the budget planning process. Finally, the forecasts from the model are compared with real data to demonstrate accuracy of the financial forecasts. The model is since then being used in the budgeting process.

Little is known about perceptions of medical expenditure risks despite their presumed relevance to the demand for health insurance. This is the first study to examine households’ beliefs about their future spending on health care. The study made a unique elicitation of subjective probabilities of medical expenditures from rural Ethiopians participating in a panel survey and offered the opportunity to enrol in a health insurance programme. The vast majority of respondents give logically consistent responses to the subjective probability questions. The data indicate that the cross-sectional variance of realized expenditures, which is often used to proxy risk exposure, greatly overestimate the risk faced by any single household. Consistent with the serial correlation observed in realized expenditures, expectations are positively correlated with past expenses. They are revised upward in response to an increase in realized expenditure and, to some extent, they predict expenditure incurred in the year ahead. Despite containing information on future medical expenditures, there is no evidence that expectations influence the decision to take out health insurance, although plans to insure are positively related to the perceived volatility of expenses.

These results suggest that adverse selection may not threaten the viability of voluntary health insurance. A caveat is that measurement error in the reported probabilities may weaken the test for adverse selection. Notwithstanding this limitation, measurement of household-specific distributions of future medical expenses is feasible and avoids relying on the cross-sectional variance, which provides an upwardly biased estimate of medical expenditure risk.

We use a laboratory experiment to examine a multitask environment common to practice, in which managers have multiple responsibilities, including both managerial reporting, as in participative budgeting settings, and effort provision toward daily tasks. Consistent with typical contracting arrangements, we examine incomplete contracts where honesty and effort are not enforceable. In such a multitask environment, when employers choose to offer comparatively generous wages to managers, we predict that managers will elect to provide higher effort. Meanwhile, we remain agnostic ex ante about the degree of misreporting due to findings in studies on gift exchange, moral licensing, and moral wiggle room. Overall, we find evidence that reciprocity, consistent with the gift-exchange model, does extend across both tasks. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Budgeting process has been largely criticized in the recent accounting literature. The responsiveness of budgets to fast-moving environments is now questioned. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by suggesting that companies use rolling forecasts as an interactive and flexible tool to cope with turbulence.

We designed a web-based survey directed to Spanish companies operating in an uncertain environment. Statistical results of the survey reveal that more than 60% of the respondents consider that changes in the environment makes it very difficult to establish accurate budgets. Respondents also mentioned that with the economic down cycle the establishment of reliable financial forecasts is requiring a great effort. At the same time, qualitative interviews have been conducted with companies already using rolling forecasts to test and further develop the use of this interactive tool.

We found that the rolling forecasts are considered to be a dynamic strategic planning tool, very useful for cash management and day-to-day decision-making process, but that they cannot replace budget for evaluation and motivation purposes.

The study has its limitations as the findings rely on a small number of survey respondents and interviewed organizations. Nevertheless the results have been compared, when possible, to those of similar surveys in order to validate them.

The article supplies actualized information about budgeting practices in a turbulent environment and more specifically in the Spanish context.

We investigate whether smooth robust methods for forecasting can help mitigate pronounced and persistent failure across multiple forecast horizons. We demonstrate that naive predictors are interpretable as local estimators of the long-run relationship with the advantage of adapting quickly after a break, but at a cost of additional forecast error variance. Smoothing over naive estimates helps retain these advantages while reducing the costs, especially for longer forecast horizons. We derive the performance of these predictors after a location shift, and confirm the results using simulations. We apply smooth methods to forecasts of UK productivity and US 10-year Treasury yields and show that they can dramatically reduce persistent forecast failure exhibited by forecasts from macroeconomic models and professional forecasters.

Purpose of paper: A growing number of studies of the issues of budget process and budget participation have recently emerged in management accounting literature. This paper extends this literature by explaining budget process and budget participation. This research explores the budget process in JPUs, studies the level of budget participation in these universities, and highlights the views and perceptions of budget preparers about the government budget format.

Design/methodology/approach: Nineteen interviews were conducted in 11 universities in Jordan and in the Ministry of Higher Education during 2008.

Findings: The data suggest that the budget usage varies between JPUs, and budget participation in some universities is not consistent where management is centralized. Although respondents understand the importance of budget usage, most of them are dissatisfied with the ministry budget format.

Research implications: The influence of budget participation on the university's overall performance and on performance of head of department may consider one of the important topics to be researched in the future. While, studying the impact of the ministry budget format on the university performance, the reverse impact and relation might be of vital interest to verify the government's expectation about the universities’ compliance and to highlight the importance of implementing a unique standard for all Jordanian universities.

Originality/value of paper: This study contributes to the literature as prior studies have researched budget process and participation in commercial companies in developed countries; this study combines the budget process, participation level while researching the governmental budget format in HEIs in a developing country.

The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of how entrepreneurs’ management activity can be assisted by utilising business plans. The main purpose of this chapter is to guide prospective tourism entrepreneurs to make a reflection on management decision-making when starting up a micro-, small- or medium-sized tourism venture.

This chapter was built on a review of management literature and authors’ industry experiences.

This chapter suggests that a well-designed business plan can help prospective entrepreneurs to (1) facilitate their decision-making, (2) minimise their risk perception and (3) increase their venture’s success probability.

This chapter is descriptive in nature to illustrate how business plans are useful instruments for decision-making in management and marketing areas.

The practical/entrepreneurial approach practical of this chapter contributes to highlight the utility and value of a business plan for any micro, small or medium tourism, travel, leisure or event venture.

This chapter is useful for prospective entrepreneurs who are planning to launch a venture but have not decided yet how to shape and start a tourism business venture.

Private, middle-market companies that choose to implement mergers, acquisitions, or growth strategies in today’s environment often face challenges when engaging with the capital markets, particularly when bridging the valuation gap between market values and owner values¹ (Marks, K., Slee, R., Blees, C., & Nall, M. (2012). Middle market M&A: Handbook for investment banking and business consulting. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.). This chapter applies traditional corporate finance theory to the real-world dynamics of private, middle-market companies and outlines practical steps to shrink the value gap and increase transaction readiness.